Built from practice, for practice
The Surveying Academy was built for the way building surveying SMEs actually train people. Most do not have a dedicated training department. Graduates and apprentices learn alongside live work, with senior surveyors fitting training around clients, projects and fees.
Jamie Collins
I am a Chartered Building Surveyor with over twenty years in practice, MRICS since 2012, and an APC assessor.
I built The Surveying Academy after more than twenty years in practice and years spent training graduates, apprentices and APC candidates. I kept seeing the same foundational questions return with every intake, while the things that really needed senior input were judgement, context, risk and client advice. If you have a question about anything here, it comes straight to me.
The foundations should be the same for everyone
Mentoring time is too valuable to spend on the basics. It should go on judgement, the detail and how to advise a client.
Over the years I have trained dozens of graduates and apprentices, watched them come through, and taken on the next intake the year after. I have even trained the people who go on to train graduates and apprentices themselves. Each time, I found myself explaining the same foundations again: how to write to a client, what to photograph on site, how to keep a file in order.
When training the trainers, I would often suggest looking for efficiencies. If you are showing one new graduate how to carry out a valuation, take a second along and show them both, even if they do not need it yet. In reality, it is never that simple.
That is how the industry has always done it. Hands-on, mentored, learnt alongside someone more experienced. That is right, and it should stay. But it means the foundations a junior learns depend on who they sit next to and how much time that person has that week. Two graduates in the same firm can end up working to two different standards.
So I built The Surveying Academy to teach the foundations once, properly, in a way juniors can go back to whenever they need it.
Building surveying should remain hands-on and mentored. The Academy is not trying to replace that. It standardises the repeatable foundation so senior surveyors can spend their time on technical judgement, risk, context and client advice.
Still have questions?
There is no contact form and no enquiry queue. Questions reach Jamie directly, and he answers them himself.
Book a 20 minute callEmail Jamie at
jamie@thesurveyingacademy.co.ukOr call 020 4652 6246. If we miss you, leave a message and we will call you back.
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